The present invention involves a method and system for evaluating and enhancing the flow of medical ethical information flow in health care organizations.
Health care organizations (i.e. community hospitals, Harvard Medical School, Washington Hospital Center, freestanding nursing homes, etc.) must disseminate ethics information from a variety of outside sources at varying levels of depth and scope. There are many different types of sources for ethical information. There are federal, state, county and municipal regulations; codes of ethics; ancient norms of medical ethics (e.g. the Hippocratic oath); standards set by accreditation boards, case law, national commissions, policies and procedures, and finding sources requirements.
There are four different areas of medical ethics: 1) clinical ethics; 2) organizational ethics; 3) legal risk management compliance; and 4) research ethics (human and animal). The only standards in place for any of these areas prior to WWII were the ancient norms of medical ethics and those set by professional associations. When the extensive human experimentation that the Nazi""s performed was discovered after WWII, the Nuremberg Code was written. The Nuremberg Code was the first major code of ethics for medical research. The Nuremberg Code, did not allow any medical research without a patients voluntary consent. By definition, this completely ruled out research on children and the mentally challenged.
The next major international guidance document directing and guiding the ethics of human research was the declaration of Helsinki. The World Medical Association wrote the first declaration of Helsinki in 1965. The declaration of Helsinki, like the Nuremberg Code, carry substantial authority and was subsequently incorporated into many international regulations.
After Nuremberg and Helsinki, the United States government and the medical establishment assumed that its doctors were not violating any ethical guidelines. Therefore, the Nuremberg and Helsinki remained only guidelines until the Tuskegee Study was revealed in 1974. The Tuskegee Study involved a study of leaving syphilis untreated in African-American male subjects, Public disclosure of the study caused a public outrage. As a consequence, a great deal of attention was paid to research ethics to insure that such experiments would not be repeated.
In addition to attention paid to research ethics, there is attention paid to each of the other three areas. Each area has a variety of codes, ethics and rules applied to it including federal, state, county and municipal (sometimes) regulations, codes of ethics, ancient norms of medical ethics, standards set by accreditation boards, case law, policies and procedures, national commissions and funding sources.
A health care organization receives information applicable to its functions from many different sources. Each source may have a different entry point to the health care organization; some may have multiple entry points. Lists of who should receive ethical information are generally kept by each sector that is an entry point. Unfortunately, these lists are often inaccurate or simplistic.
Much of the above material is sent to department heads to decide who else needs to see it. Department heads often neglect to disseminate important information because they do not have the time to sift through all of the information, disagree with the information, or overlook important points altogether.
The major problem with this method of distribution is that the amount of information that each department head receives is enormous. Only a small portion of what they receive is important for each department. In addition, of the small portion that is important for each department, different people (i.e. nurses, doctors, etc.) will need to review and understand different portions of it. For example, rather than each person receiving the few pages of pertinent information, the department head receives 400 pages that he or she does not have time to sift through in order to determine what to distribute and what is important to each person who needs it.
As a result of the above, the task of distributing the appropriate material to the appropriate people within health care organizations requires a detailed understanding of how medical ethical information is distributed within the health care organization and a way to modify that method. Thus, there exists a need in the art for a method of evaluating and enhancing medical ethical information flow at health care organizations.
The present invention is a method of evaluating and improving the flow of medical ethical information within a health care organization. The dissemination practices of the health care organization are determined, so that a process map can be generated. This process map is used to pinpoint problems with the information flow of medical ethical information with the health care organization. New policies and/or procedures are devised to alleviate the problems and the hospital""s personnel is trained in the implementation of the new policies and/or procedures.
It is, therefore, an object of the present invention to provide a method of evaluating and improving the medical ethical information dissemination practices of health care organizations.
It is further an object of the present invention to provide a method of evaluating the flow of medical ethical information within a health care organization by determining the functions of said health care organization; determining what medical ethical information the health care organization must distribute; determining which disciplines and which functions should receive each piece of medical ethical information; determining what information each individual is actually receiving; determining the current dissemination practices; and generating a process map of the current dissemination practices.
It is another object of the present invention to use the process map to improve the dissemination practices.
It is further an object of the present invention that the dissemination practices are evaluated to determine if any problems that are illustrated in the process map can be alleviated within the health care organization""s current policies and procedures or if the policies and procedures are the problem.
It is yet another object of the present invention that if the policies and procedures are determined to be the problem, the policies and procedures are modified.
It is another object of the present invention that the health care organization""s personnel are educated and trained to implement the modified policies and procedures.
It is further an object of the present invention that if the problems can be alleviated within the health care organization""s current policies and procedures, additional procedures are devised to alleviate the problem.
It is yet another object of the present invention that the health care organization""s personnel are trained to implement the additional procedures.
It is another object of the present invention to provide a system for evaluating the flow of medical ethical information within a health care organization comprising a microprocessor, a user interface, a display, and a data storage area. The data storage area stores medical ethical information classified by discipline and function.
If is further an object of the present invention that when a request for medical ethical information for a specific discipline and function is entered into the user interface, the microprocessor retrieves the corresponding information from the data storage area and displays the information.
It is yet another object of the present invention that the data storage area stores discipline and function information for health care organization employees.
It is another object of the present invention that when new medical ethical information, and its corresponding discipline and function classification, are entered into the data storage area, the microprocessor automatically displays a distribution list for the new information.
It is further an object of the present invention that the data storage area stores medical ethical information classified by discipline, function, and geographical location.
Other objects and advantages of the present invention will be readily apparent from the following description and drawings which illustrate the present invention.